At oxford

Saving the classic beach vacation with friends for last, I spent my penultimate college spring break instead visiting my high school best friend and half third cousin whom are studying abroad at the University of Oxford. This is a record of my mental adjustments on existing ideas enabled by my experiences there.

1. You will always encounter procrastinator-presenting people, but "not all those who wander are lost." High agency, high magnitude people—professors, (authentic) startup founders/engineers, excelling students, the best of the best—are true masters of priorities; their intentional time delegation however can translate as temporization to the outsider who upholds a different ordering of priorities. The first two masters that come to mind: my father, a professor, who drilled into me at a young age Jocko Willink's "Discipline Equals Freedom," and my freshman-year roommate Caleb, the most "no days off" and of high moral conviction environmental engineer you will ever meet. This idea and these people are scattered everywhere, but Oxford is an entire university of priorities masters. I still have elevation to climb, but seeing a vast yet diverse set of them in one place gives me confidence that this state is more reachable than it appears to be.
2. The pedagogical merit to contextualizing material is undervalued. The lectures in the Mathematical Institute on which I sat in were brilliant, brilliant because every professor, at the beginning, middle, and end of their talks, would frame the material historically, with respect to other topics in the course syllabus, or as a tool for or fundamental concept in ongoing research directions. In fact, Prof. Maynard explained, at a level anyone could understand, how what we were learning is used in his research field and appears as a tool to reach a main result in one of his papers. To that end, it is a complete myth, at least for mathematics, that professors who have a research focus are worse at teaching. Maybe that speaks more to how much teaching one in math does while climbing the academic ladder relative to those in other fields and regardless of one's teaching/research -focus split. Ultimately, pausing to frame ideas before communicating them is undervalued because it increases quality of the idea, the extent to which the idea is comprehended and most importantly retained by the receiver. In our imperfect ever-degrading memory graphs, a node with more edges is more strongly connected and for longer.
3. The race is always of rats. To start off with context, I refer in my writings to an idea I adopted from Adam Grant's book, "Give and Take...": there are takers, or those who hoard information, don't tip the Starbucks worker, do 10% of the work for 90% of the credit, step on others to succeed; and there are givers, or those who share what they can, teach, do 90% of the work for 10% of the credit, give expecting nothing in return. One falls somewhere on the scale of taker to giver, computed by the weighted sum of their actions, or their net self. But, for simplicity, we classify individuals as one or the other. The point I quote in Grant's book: if we create a histogram bucketing a randomly selected set of people where quantified success is the x axis, left with a normal distribution, the observation is that, with error, within two standard deviations above and below the mean exist the takers, and outside these bounds exist the givers. Takers are everywhere and can get very far in life. Givers are rare but are the world changers. What Grant fails to address is the extent to which the giver must lose first. In the short-term, takers take the trophy. "Heads-up," the taker always beats the giver. From a professional lens, there are those who present, and those who are. I see presenters in finance and consulting—it's more about the names under your belt than merit, looks and conversationalism than ability to communicate effectively. The tech world likes to think it's more merit-based, but I am too uninformed to be opine. I thought that academia and research would be more about you and less about those who back you, because you see so many givers interested in mathematics/physics/CS research. There are two underlying problems however: 1. given the incredibly high bar for what deems one a "good" candidate for academia, it's challenging for one to showcase and subsequently be assessed if they haven't explored all of the following endeavors: undergraduate research, assistant teaching, graduate-level courses, competitions or environments that showcase no-guidance problem-solving; 2. the gap in quality of education is significant, at least for math, to the point where prestige of the name/title backing the candidate has a strong positive correlation with quality of the candidate... supposedly. The result? You have all these givers forced to run the race of the taker. I only recently opened my ears to all the shallow conversations about "doing [x] to be able to ask professor [g] for a recommendation letter", "doing [y] this summer because it will look good on the cv", etc. And it's not the fault of the student; it's the fault of the system[0]. To the lesson, I almost learned that, unlike what my principled self did not do in high school, I should just run this race and do what it takes. But that's always what most people have been saying, and most people are takers. Where the line must be drawn is when it comes to people. If you take from man, you aren't one.

Jonathan, Sam, thank you for showing me around!





[0] Notice the root of the cause is a communication quality bottleneck, the lack of a formal verification method.